Why Onward?

We're not your average marketing and website agency. In fact, we don't consider ourselves an agency at all.

We practice results-based, perpetual marketing. Branding is important to any company, but many agencies can't figure out what really comes between branding and actual conversions -- as in real people spending real money because of marketing. Beautiful billboards, half-page print ads and slick radio commercials don't mean a thing if they don't bring in new clients. Somewhere along the way ROI was dropped from the marketing and websites conversation. We're bringing it back in style.

We're partners with your company. We're more than happy to start small and grow with your business. If we're not a good fit or aren't delivering results, you can quit at any time. NO long-term contracts. Just our digital marketing campaigns earning their keep.

We're flexible. You're welcome to change your digital marketing package at any time and payment is month-to-month. Need a big push for three months, followed by a less aggressive maintenance package? We can handle that without massive scope changes, breach of contract or generally losing it. Priorities shift. Companies grow. Budgets change. We get that and we can work around it.

We get it. Onward Co-founder Nate Long also owns a small wedding DJ business, which has increased business by at least 50% every year since 2011. He understands the balance between opportunistic growth and responsible spending. He doesn't recommend a client spend money on anything he wouldn't be willing to try himself, and most of his unique tactics derive from a fertile testing ground -- his own business. Onward respects your money and marketing investment.

We provide all-on-one digital marketing solutions. Our team includes content marketers, website developers, graphic designers, social media marketers, copywriters and coders. We can handle each piece of the digital marketing puzzle. We specialize in digital and therefore rarely touch traditional (radio, magazines, billboards, TV, etc.). Without massive budgets, we just don't see the same return dollar-for-dollar from traditional that we get from digital, so we put the money where the conversions are.

Time is Money Life. As a busy business owner, you likely don't have a lot of time to write pages and pages of consumer-friendly web copy, create sitemaps and provide expert creative direction. Yet this is actually what many marketing agencies require of you to do their job. Who knew by paying thousands of dollars each month that your own workload would double? Not cool. That's why our processes have been optimized to require at most one hour of your time each week. In one hour, we can glean any information, expertise, guidance and feedback needed for our entire team to be efficient with the week's tasks. Meanwhile you enjoy more of your life and let us take care of the rest. That is why you likely got into business, after all.

Our team is run by a full-stack digital marketer and full-stack web designer. This means true integration of strategy, tactics and results. Strategy isn't derived from a narrow view of user interface alone, of social media marketing alone or of Search Engine Optimization alone, but instead from a holistic understanding of how marketing, design, code and each of the sub-genres of digital marketing can work together to produce real change and results.

We're here to help you learn too. Ultimately, we realize that results matter more than anything, but we want you to learn from working with us as well. We love teaching our clients along the way and explaining why some things are working while others aren't. We're not the gatekeepers of knowledge, and our founders are even available for training and speaking opportunities as well.

Like your website? It's yours. Many web design agencies impose draconian measures to ensure your dependency on their services. They technically own your website, your domain and even access to your code. Oftentimes, they build your website in proprietary content management systems that only they know how to navigate, so you're dependent on them for even the most basic content edits. We take a different approach. When you build your new website with Onward, you'll own the website and domain. We'll build it in a well known content management system (typically the open-source WordPress platform) and we'll even train you how to make basic edits to the website and manage your own content. We do offer maintenance packages, but they're not necessary -- simply a convenience rather than a hostage situation. Repeat business should be earned not enforced.